Rehabilitation for Somatosensory Disorders

A variety of diseases can lead to somatosensory impairment, such as spinal cord injury, stroke, diabetic neuropathy, chemotherapy-related neuropathy. The manifestations are complex and varied, including hyperalgesia or sensory sensitivity, neuropathic pain, numbness, pruritus, etc. These diseases have a serious impact on people's quality of life and even endanger their lives and health, imposing a heavy burden on patients, families and society. However, compared with movement disorders, sensory disorders are often ignored and there is no specific targeted treatment. Neuropathic pain, in particular, remains difficult to treat. The pathogenesis of somatosensory disorders is complex and has not been fully illustrated so far. Fortunately, rehabilitation therapy has shown to be effective to the somatosensory disorders. For example, non-invasive treatments of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, transcranial direct current stimulation, and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation have been proved to alleviate neuropathic pain. Another example is that exercise appears to reduce chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy symptoms. As a beneficial supplement to drug therapy, rehabilitation therapy is now considered a promising approach and a research direction for future development.

Somatosensory disorder is a subjective experience and there are no objective criteria for evaluation and diagnosis. At present, medical imaging and neuroscience techniques are advancing rapidly, and emerging technologies, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)/Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Electroencephalogram (EEG), and Functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRs), can provide certain biomarkers of somatosensory disorders, for instance, the enhanced cortical theta power in patients and animal models with acute/chronic pain. The biometric characteristics based on in depth phenotypic profiling can help identify predictors of the response in clinical trials to achieve more individualized therapy and ensure appropriate management.

This research topic aims to explore the research of rehabilitation therapy on somatosensory disorders, especially neuropathic pain, from basic science to clinical application, including but not limited to exploring the effectiveness of rehabilitation medicine and other related disciplines in preventing the origination and maintenance of somatosensory disorders, elucidating the underlying mechanisms of rehabilitation treatments to somatosensory disorders by using advanced technology, as well as developing biomarkers for objective assessment and prognosis. In this topic, we focus on collecting and studying the application of rehabilitation therapy to the somatosensory disorders, and aim to find low-cost, low-risk, scalable non-pharmaceutical applications to improve the sensory function, as well as producing biomarkers to facilitate the diagnosis and assessment.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Basic and clinical trials on the therapeutic effects of rehabilitation therapies for somatosensory disorders

• Basic and clinical research to unravel the mechanisms underlying the origination and maintenance of somatosensory disorders

• Mechanisms of brain functional change due to non-pharmocological therapy, particularly at brain network level

• The mechanisms, interventions, or patient phenotypes of neuropathic pain

• Developing biomarkers using medical imaging and neuroscience techniques

• Mechanism research about treatment of somatosensory disorders with the use of deep and/or reinforcement learning to brain imaging techniques or electroencephalogram decoding and mapping.

• Original Research Articles, Clinical Trial, Reviews, Systematic Reviews or Meta-analysis are all welcomed.